The Dissappointment Artist

I’ve wrapped up Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist.

It’s a collection of essays about the interests and events in the life of the author. I decided to read this after reading a review along the lines of “if you loved Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude” – I did – “you’ve GOT to get you some o’ this”. Maybe it was a little more literate than that.

The take home message of the positive reviews of this book was that these are autobiographical stories that would expand your appreciation of Lethem’s Brooklyn books. So I was on board. And I was disappointed. At least I feel a connection with the title of the book. That’s the easiest and cheapest review of this book. I’ll try to expand on that.

Here’s what I didn’t like. A lot of the writing was about stuff that I love: books and music. I didn’t feel the enthusiasm on Lethem’s part. There are descriptions of the Brooklyn neighborhood where Lethem grew up that are earnest and heartfelt, yet they don’t measure up to the same neighborhood as described in Fortress. There is a passionate essay about the films of John Cassavetes and about a John Wayne movie, The Searchers, that did nothing for me. He writes about music that transported him as a teen, and you don’t really care either way. This is Jonathan Lethem, one of my favorite writers. What the f*ck is going on? Well, try this sample sentence on for size:

This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread.
I couldn’t understand that sentence until I drew a figure on the blackboard. That sentence made me want to fight. It may be the most pretentious thing you read all year. At least I hope so. The very next sentence in that essay should be on the front cover as a subtitle: “The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana.” That’s it. I think Lethem felt that he was getting into the realm of arcana – writing about things that no one else would really care about – but he’d put it out there anyway. As if it were an obligation. I honestly believe that almost any one of these essays could be one of the greatest conversations you’ve ever had if you met Lethem by chance in a bar in Brooklyn, bought him a few rounds, and let him tell you his stories — and he knew that you cared. It just doesn’t read that way though. And it gives me no joy to crap all over it.

Also: I felt like a jerk riding on the bus with that cover. Vaguely pornographic? Maybe that’s why they couldn’t put the masturbation blurb on the cover.

Must…Get…Hobby

What would happen if we were bought by Google:

From Logogle. (Link via Boing Boing)

Speaking of Plot Against America

The NYT has an article about the man who actually ran against FDR leading up to WWII (it turns out it wasn’t Lindbergh). Charles Peters’ new book Five Days in Philadelphia tells the real story. It sounds as interesting as the Roth version. You know, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

More McEwan on London Bombings

I guess when you’re prescient and well-spoken, people want to talk with you. Ian McEwan talks about his book Saturday and the London Bombings at Der Spiegel (I believe that’s German for “the spiegel”) and The Morning News (both links from Bookslut).

Speaking of prescient… Some talk about the bombings indicates that the bombers may be Muslims born and raised in England. Zadie Smith’s book White Teeth (love me some Zadie Smith) hinted at something similar, although on a much smaller scale.

The Extremely Curious and Close Incident of the Incredibly Loud Dog in the Night-time

Being behind the times like I am, I just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. It was another book that I picked up while browsing in the bookstore with my son, and I didn’t know anything about it other than the praise on the cover. Clearly I must have missed Elvismith’s post earlier. A very quick and easy read, and I don’t have anything bad to say about it EXCEPT that you shouldn’t read this back-to-back with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’ve reached my quota of precocious youngsters for this decade. Don’t get me wrong — this book’s main character, Christopher Boone, is very different from ELIC’s main character, Oskar Schell. He’s older, he’s autistic (which isn’t patently obvious until a little ways into the book), and he’s British, so lots of times I don’t know what in the hell he’s talking about (what exactly are “A Level Maths”, anyway?). But they both have savant qualities in some respects, and each story is a quasi-mystery that takes place following the main character’s loss of a parent.

The main difference in my mind between the books was my ability to identify with Oskar more than with Christopher. Sure, Oskar and I are very different, but I could relate to him to a much greater degree (because we’re both rational people) than Christopher Boone. That’s not to say that I couldn’t understand what Christopher was doing; rather, I just couldn’t put myself in his shoes as easily because he reacted to situations as an autistic child might. I don’t know what it feels like to cover my ears, groan, and cube the numbers 1 through 50 in my head in order to distract myself from an uncomfortable situation.

All in all, though, I think an enjoyable and easy read, and the story has at least one twist that was pretty clever.

The Plot Agianst My Sleeping Habits

The Plot Against America has been much discussed, here and elsewhere, and it made most critics’ Best of 2004 lists. I don’t have much to add to all that bloviatin’, but I wholeheartedly agree that this is One Very Important Book. I normally steer clear of counter-factual history (”What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War?!”). I tend to disdain the genre nearly as much as I do comic books, but this one really got under my skin (in part because it was only barely counter-factual).

The counter-factual premise here is that Charles Lindbergh (a fascist sympathizer in real life) ran against and defeated FDR in the 1940 election, and that he then kept the US out of WW2 and put into motion something of a Final Solution-lite for American Jews.

I won’t discuss any more of the plot, because I can’t without giving it away to those who haven’t read it, but I will say that I found the book utterly compelling when I thought of Roth’s Lindy as a homegrown fascist, and much less so when he was shown to (maybe) be something else. The plot of Plot struck me as about 5 degrees off of historical reality through most of the book, and it literally kept me up at night; the founding idea of this book ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. I found it impossible not to believe as I read it that it really could happen here. And not just in the past.

Roth’s portrait of young Phillip’s family will stick with me for a long time. Phillip’s parents are absolutely heroic. As a father, I’d like to think that I would make some of the same decisions Phillip’s parents made, even given all of the grief those decisions may have caused the family.

Which Book Are You

Find out here.

I’m either Siddhartha or Anne of Green Gables. So I got that goin’ for me.

Sin City (vol. 7): Hell and Back

That’s right. While I was supposed to be on vacation, I read Frank Miller’s 7th Volume of the Sin City series Hell and Back. Keeping it noire yall.

I also stayed up past my bed time, and I played video games, too. So there.

This is a graphic novel. Sin City was also a movie that did not feature any of the action in this book. I have not read any of the other Sin City books. I started with this one because I was unable to distinguish a “1″ from a “7″ on the spine. I’d say, on the whole, that this is not a “gateway” comic, but I enjoyed it plenty. Last week I worked during my planned vacation (hurricane); tomorrow, I go to work in Florida for the rest of the week. It’s crazy. I look forward to reading all of your posts when I return. Later.

Also in the news

The NYT has Violet Incredible vs. W.

Vocabulary Quiz

In lieu of work (I am supposed to be on vacation), I was just reading a review in the NYT by Christopher Hitchens of Bob Woodward’s new book, The Secret Man. The review contains this (abridged) sentence:

“…and that very special moment when John Mitchell, a former attorney general of these United States, made an explicit threat to Katharine Graham’s poitrine.”

Which, of course, begs the question, “What the hell does poitrine mean?” I’m at a loss. I looked it up in the two dictionairies that I have on hand, as well as in an on-line dictionary. No dice. On a hunch, I used Babel Fish to translate what might be a French word into English, and I got “chest”. That doesn’t make much sense. So I’m opening this up to the floor. Anybody have any idea what the word means? Bonus points will be awarded to anyone who can also fill in the historical context.

Update: Well, times up. I answered my own question. “Chest” is in fact the answer. From Wikipedia:

Katharine Graham (June 16, 1917 – July 17, 2001) was the head of The Washington Post newspaper for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that helped bring down President Richard Nixon. She has been widely described as one of the most powerful American women of the 20th century. Graham was the subject of one of the most famous threats in American journalism history. It occurred in 1972, when Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”

Holy shit. That Watergate was messed up.

In Cold Blood

I’m supposed to be on vacation. Stupid hurricane. The upside is I’ve been staying up late and getting caught up on my reading. It’s almost like being at the beach. Next up: I’ve finished reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

It is the chilling true story of the murder of an innocent Kansan family in their home by two killers with no apparent motive who left virtually no clues on the scene. It’s documentary noire, gritty and unsentimental.

The book was written in the early sixties, at what I assume was a more innocent time. However, two of the most shocking facts, for me, were found on the first page of the book, which is about the author. It turns out that Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans. As am I. Yet I had no idea. NOLA is a more literate city than most, I would wager. How come no one hipped me to this, or said, “dude, you totally gotta read this”. I mean I was made to read The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, which I only remember as being really boring for my tender age. No one could spare any love for Truman Capote? In Cold Blood would have gone down much easier for a young teen than Walker Percy. The second bomb shell, for me, was that Capote also wrote Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Everyone that I’ve mentioned this to says, “well……., yeah”. Where have I been? Under a rock?

I recommend this book if you feel the need to get your gritty true crime drama on.

Update: It was timely of the New York Times to get on board with my post today and run an article about two upcoming movies about Truman Capote and this book. Thanks boys.

New Kid on the Block

FlavaWheel III was born July 5 – 8 lbs of boy, 21 inches. Mom and l’il Flava are doing well.

Never Let Me Go

In the finsished column: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

This book made it to my “to read” pile after I read some very positive reviews and after months of the book sitting insistently atop my Amazon recommendations. It was also a birthday gift. The book does have a surprise or twist element to it. So if this book is in your “to read” stack, you may not want to read further.

So you couldn’t resist, eh? OK. Here’s the deal. The book begins at an English boarding school in the mid-Nineties. It appears to be your typical boarding school, except something seems to be not quite right. The teachers are hiding something from the students, or at least not telling them everything that they should know. And then, slowly it is revealed. The students are all clones who are being raised to be adults who will then donate an organ at a time to those of us who need them and are, you know – normal.

The kids are raised to eventually become “carers” for their kind who begin the donations in a sequence that usually ends in “completion” after four donations. The book mentions in passing that they came up with the technology before thinking through the implications of what all this would mean. Are they really human? etc. However, once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no going back. Once your wife got a new heart, you wouldn’t really care where it came from.

The author also wrote Remains of the Day. If you saw the movie, or read the book, you may have a good feel for what the writing and tone of the book were like. It also reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s an interesting book that makes you think about some of the questions that may be coming our way before too long.

Let me preface the following comments with this : I enjoyed the book. I really did. However, its not the same book that I would have written, given the same premise. I’m not sure why the author chose to set the book in the 1990’s. Does that make it Not Science Fiction? Or because the time has already passed, it should be pretty clear that this is Fiction? The book doesn’t describe in any way the elaborate social control measures that would need to be taken to subdue the future organ donors or hide them from our recoiling view. In fact, as adults they seem to be able to roam around and have lives, cars, apartments, etc. So I kept asking myself what keeps them there? Why not keep on driving through the Chunnel and kick it in France. You want my organs – you’ll have to find me first. Where was the clone uprising against the organ-needing oppressors? It seems the author wanted to steer well clear of anything that might suggest science fiction. OK. Whatever. The book also doesn’t spell out the order of the donations, but it seems like they were all internal organs. Why not things like eyes, hands, or skin – things that would have kept them alive, possibly disfigured, beyond the three of four typical donations. These kinds of donations would have made them even freakier. Too Science Fiction?

Maybe I’ll write that book. It will feature a maverick organ donor of Cajun ancestry who drives his car through the Chunnel and lives in France with his limbless friend with no eyes who escaped by Fed-Ex-ing himself to Cannes. Yeah. I don’t want to give away all of the plot. Look for it soon wherever fine books are sold.

Note: I finished this book at the end of June. As I mentioned in another post, between baseball and the Tour, I am falling way behind in reading and posting. Thanks to Shaft for taking up some of the slack. The All Star Break is here and the Tour has a rest day, so it is catch up time. Also, Hurricane Fuckstick has canceled my vacation. Thanks for that.

London Bombings

Ian McEwan’s book Saturday was largely about the feeling of dread that something like the London bombings would happen. The Guardian has a piece by McEwan about the bombings.

Moneyball

If you’ve read Moneyball, you have to read this San Francisco Gate article about why Joe Morgan, the greatest second baseman in the game, hates a book that he hasn’t read. It’s a timely read with the All Star Break upon us. An aside: one of the great crimes that ESPN has inflicted upon its readers is making Rob Neyer’s articles premium, for pay, content. I used to read him religiously, but I’m not ready to step up to the ESPN Insider subscription. Write your congressman.

Freakonomics

My quick little retreat into nonfiction was extended via a run through Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt (the rogue economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (the guy who helped him write this, and who let a typo slip by on page 156 that even the editors didn’t catch).

While one might think I would have been scared off by the fact that the only praise featured on the front cover of the book jacket came from Malcolm Gladwell, author of the boring Blink, I’m a gamer and so I gave it a go nonetheless.

Do these writings in and of themselve classify Levitt as “rogue”? I don’t really think so. Did he explore the hidden side of “everything”? Well, even I would have a hard time doing that in a mere 207 pages. But still, all in all, I would say a satisfying read.

The premise of the book is that Levitt developed a reputation for being an economist who doesn’t look at obvious questions, and who doesn’t look at questions the obvious way. While he uses numbers in fleshing out his conclusions (as any economist would), his technique is often to turn a problem on its head and look at it differently than anyone else had. He delights in undermining conventional wisdom, and in illustrating that many correlations that may seem intuitive or obvious either don’t exist or that the factors that correlate have no causal relationship to one another.

Many of his conclusions are not exactly earthshattering. I don’t think you need to be a genius to understand (or at least to suspect) that real estate agents’ interests are often not directly aligned with their clients, or that naming your daughter “Lucienne” won’t, in and of itself, make her smarter (although the fact that you named her “Lucienne” is an indicator that her parents are likely highly-educated, successful people who have likely passed on the genetic materials that will lead her to be smart). By the way, the most comforting conclusion that he reaches in this book is that the amount of television a child watches has absolutely no correlation to how well that child will test in school. [”Hey Max and Morgan — Go turn on SpongeBob and leave your mother and me alone today!”]

But seriously, folks. The most shocking issue discussed in the book, and for which Levitt apparently gets full credit, is the correlation (and suspected causality) between Roe v. Wade and the drop in crime in the 1990’s. This discussion, however shocking and offensive it may be, is thought-provoking to say the least.

One last comment — while I was not annoyed at all by the “gimmicks” used by Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the “gimmick” employed by these guys in this book is pretty damn annoying — each chapter starts with a page of praise for Levitt lifted from the New York Times Magazine. Sorry, guys, but that stuff is supposed to go on the back cover.

Bullsh*t On Bullsh*t

How any guy can see a book entitled On Bullshit at the bookstore for five bucks and not pick it up is beyond me.

I saw it (while I was perusing the bookstore with my son, no less), and had to pick it up. It’s by Harry G. Frankfurt, who is apparently some renowned moral philosopher and professor of such-and-such philosophy at Princeton. And this tiny tome (only 67 pages, each only 3.5″ x 6″) illustrated to me that smart guys like him don’t know any more than I do about bullsh*t.

I won’t go through his theories in detail (you can borrow the book and read it yourself about as quickly as you can finish reading this post), but suffice it to say that he meanders quite a bit. And he likes to make statements like “there is nothing in theory to support [insert debatable statement here]”, and the like, without any backup to support his point. I don’t know if this is how philosophers operate (by prefacing a statement with a qualifier like this, thereby making the writer’s statement true), but to me, that’s about as bullsh*t a move as you can make. He also drops lots of what I assume are big names (at least to you philosophers out there), like the notorious Max Black, the inimitable Wittgenstein, the highly underrated Fania Pascal, the highly overrated Eric Ambler, and the positively heavenly Saint Augustine. These failed to impress me.
However, to sum it up (and to save you the trouble of reading the book, now that you’ve invested this much time in reading this post), I think herr Frankfurt’s aim was to develop a meaning for the word “bullsh*t”, and through his meanderings, he seems to develop the position that bullsh*t is essentially oration by a speaker who has no regard for the truth or falsity of his statement, but rather, simply wishes the listener to gain a particular impression about what the speaker is up to. In other words, a bullsh*t statement can be true or it can be false, and a bullsh*tter doesn’t know and doesn’t care — all he wants is for the listener to think some particular thing about the bullsh*tter. He takes the position that bullsh*tting and lying are different, and that bullsh*tting is the more dangerous of the two.

Upon reflection, I guess I can see his point, at least insofar as what “bullsh*t” is, but I don’t think I agree that a bullsh*tter doesn’t know or care about the truth of what he’s talking about. Sure, lots of people are put on the spot and asked to make a statement about something that they know nothing about, and in response will throw out some bullsh*t. And often, they may not know the truth of their statement, but I bet they care about it (and some of them probably lose sleep over it). And I also think that some of the most compelling bullsh*tters out there absolutely know that what they’re saying isn’t the truth (or at least not the whole truth) when they’re bullsh*tting, but they purposely make false statements in order to incentivize the listener (see, e.g., politicians). This is lying (or at least some form of deception), but wouldn’t qualify as “bullsh*t” under the learned professor’s definition. And that, to me, is bullsh*t.

Chaz has a Posse

Swathmore students take a stand against idiots.

It’s All about the Brooklyn

The NYT’s Book Section is chock full of Brooklyn-related goodness. First off was a review (of sorts) about the new Jonathan Lethem book o’ essays, The Dissapointment Artist. The article features lots of the Brooklyn sociology featured in The Fortress of Solitude. Then there was an account of Brooklyn novelist John Wray’s book tour for his new novel, Canaan’s Tongue. He decided to build a raft and float down the Mississippi River and do readings at book stores along the way. Having grown up along the banks of the Mississippi River, I can attest that this is both remarkably insane and incredibly cool. Flippin’ sweet.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close & Frequently Read

Based on previous posts and on my own ambition to be as well-read as the next guy, I just read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

The basis for the story here is a difficult one — a boy who lost his father in 9/11. I think that’s part of what makes the story so moving — that it resonates with anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave since September 10, 2001 (and doesn’t know what happened the next day), or with anyone who’s ever lost a parent, or with anyone who’s ever had a child.

I haven’t read Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated, and so I’m not prepared to comment on his writing style in general, but in this book, he pretty much writes like a nine year-old boy would talk. A borderline unbelievably-smart nine year-old boy, but a precocious, imaginative nine year-old boy nonetheless. The story and the writing don’t get bogged down in metaphor or overly-challenging verbosity (speaking of which, is verbosity a word?). And with this simple style, he still manages to make some pretty amazing statements, both philosophical (”[s]he wants to know if I love her, that’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet”) and even metaphorical (”[i]t broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of”). There are a few challenging aspects to his writing style in this book — e.g., conversations aren’t broken down into new paragraphs every time the speaker changes; they are written as a series of quotes in the same paragraph, requiring you to “keep score” in your head as you’re reading the paragraph to remember who’s talking at any given point. And there are some quirky elements added in for good measure — pages with just a couple words on them, pages where the text scrunches into itself, the flipbook movie at the end — but they didn’t annoy me.

All in all, a fine book. Not exactly happy reading, but somehow not really a tragedy, either. And I must say that what Foer does in the last two pages (before the flipbook movie), seems so simple, but as you read it, you can’t help but realize that it represents absolute genius in both thinking and writing.